Sleep medicine professorship honors U-M field pioneer

Updated 10:00 AM November 20, 2006

Sleep medicine professorship honors U-M field pioneer

By Kara Gavin
U-M Health System Public Relations

The University has become one of the first institutions in the nation to create a professorship devoted entirely to the study of sleep and the treatment of sleep disorders.

The new position, inaugurated Nov. 15, was created with $500,000 in contributions made in memory of Dr. Michael Aldrich, founder of the U-M Sleep Disorders Center, who died six years ago of a rare cancer at the age of 51.

Out of that tragedy grew a unique collegiate professorship in the Medical School funded largely by Aldrich's parents, Dr. C. Knight Aldrich, and Julie Aldrich, peers and former students. Its first recipient will be Dr. Ronald Chervin, the current director of the Sleep Disorders Center, professor in the Department of Neurology and a noted researcher on the diagnosis, impact and treatment of sleep disorders in adults and children.

Chervin also directs the Michael S. Aldrich Sleep Disorders Laboratory, where patients can stay to have their sleep, breathing and other functions recorded. The laboratory, which was dedicated to Aldrich before his death, opened in 1985 and soon will move from University Hospital to a larger location within the medical center. A second laboratory, on South State Street, opened in 2004.

With its two laboratories, multiple specialty sleep clinics, research projects and training programs, the Sleep Disorders Center is among the largest, most productive and most comprehensive in the nation.

It's believed that only Harvard University preceded U-M in creating a sleep professorship. Both institutions have been at the forefront of the rapid pace of discovery in this relatively new field of medicine.

In just the past two decades, many studies have revealed the importance of sleep and its relationship to overall health and performance, as well as the benefits of effective treatment for sleep disorders.

Chervin and his colleagues, for example, have reported evidence of strong links between children's nighttime sleeping problems, especially those related to breathing, and their daytime behavior, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Chervin currently leads several studies on this issue and evaluating the efficacy of diagnostic sleep tests.

"Dr. Aldrich made many seminal contributions to sleep medicine," Chervin says. "He not only advanced our knowledge about narcolepsy and many other sleep disorders, but also helped to establish the new field's professional identity and the mechanisms used to train and certify sleep specialists."

Aldrich recruited Chervin to U-M in 1994, at the completion of advanced training in sleep medicine at Stanford University. The two became friends as well as colleagues.

A graduate of Harvard University and the Stanford University Medical School, Chervin preceded his Stanford sleep training with a residency in neurology at Cornell University Medical Center and the New York Hospital. He received his master's degree in clinical research design from the U-M School of Public Health in 1997.

The co-inventor of a technique for analyzing brain-wave changes in patients with breathing problems during sleep, Chervin is published widely and is an associate editor for the journal Sleep. In 2004, he won the Sleep Science Award from the American Academy of Neurology. He was elected to the board of directors for the Sleep Research Society and the International Pediatric Sleep Association and is a past president of the Michigan Sleep Disorders Association.

Sleep medicine professorship honors U-M field pioneer

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